Unstacking the Deck

Meet the warriors fighting to protect and prevent child victims of sexual abuse and what they — and our kids — are up against

By Craig Manning | Feb. 26, 2022

Every nine minutes.
 
That’s how often child protective service agencies in the United States substantiate a claim of child sexual abuse (CSA), according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN).

In total, one in every nine girls and one in every 53 boys will experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult before they turn 18. In the 2016 fiscal year alone, U.S. child protective service agencies found evidence for the sexual abuse of more than 57,000 children. 

These statistics are staggering and sobering, but no matter how often they are repeated or shared, misconceptions and misperceptions about CSA persist. One of the most common misconceptions of all? The belief among many people that their communities are an exception to the rule, that “it couldn’t possibly happen here.”

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
That false belief is just one of the many myths that Kyle Attwood grapples with on a regular basis as part of his job. Attwood is the chief assistant prosecuting attorney with the Grand Traverse County prosecutor’s office, a role that gives him a front-row seat to many of the criminal prosecutions that happen in northern Michigan’s largest county. When asked how often CSA cases come across his desk, Attwood doesn’t pull punches.

“They’re unfortunately really common,” Attwood tells Northern Express. “We see a lot of those cases come through our office, and we know there are even more that that don't get reported. I think the statistic is about one in 10 children will be sexually abused before their 18th birthday, so it's incredibly prevalent, and I think somewhere around 60 percent of those victims never tell anyone. So, it's a smaller number that gets reported, and then obviously a smaller number that ends up in a criminal case. But still, when we're talking about one in 10, the numbers across the community are huge.”

In the American justice system, sexual assault and abuse are among the most under-reported and under-prosecuted of all crimes. According to RAINN, only 310 of every 1,000 sexual assaults are ever reported to the police. Just 50 of those reports ever lead to an arrest, 28 bring about a felony conviction, and 25 result in incarceration. All told, 975 of every 1,000 sexual assault perpetrators walk free. 

STACKING THE DECK
Under-reporting is only part of the problem. The U.S. justice system is built, in part, on constitutional principles that protect the rights of the accused. A person is innocent until proven guilty, for instance, and has a right to face their accuser and to be present at their own trial. But these factors and others, Attwood says, can be a double-edged sword when it comes to seeking justice for sexual assault survivors — especially in cases where those survivors are kids or teenagers.

“The deck really is stacked against them,” Attwood says of CSA victims. “[Pursuing a criminal case] involves them being judged, challenged, criticized, ridiculed, made out to be a liar, made out to be somebody who made this up. They have to be cross-examined by the defendant’s attorney, while the perpetrator of the abuse is there in the courtroom staring at them the whole time. It really can be a re-victimization for them.” 

Because court hearings and jury trials can be so traumatic for young victims, Attwood says the prosecutor’s office tries to be “really victim-centered in the way we approach those cases.” To a certain extent, that victim-centered approach even involves letting the victim decide whether a case gets prosecuted or not — or, at least, whether it ends up in a courtroom with the young victim expected to serve as a key witness.

“In these cases, what has been done to the kids has really taken all of their control of the situation away,” Attwood says. “So, we try to give them as much power to help us make decisions on a case as we can. If they are comfortable moving forward, and if they go in with eyes open and understand the process, then we're willing to walk through that with them. But I don't like forcing a victim to go through something when they're not willing or comfortable to do that, because it’s not a pleasant experience. As much control as we can give them, it’s a way of giving back some of what was taken from them in whatever abuse they suffered.”

THE JURY PROBLEM
The Grand Traverse County prosecutor’s office often does something akin to a “dress rehearsal” for CSA victims who decide to move forward with their cases. That process involves taking the victim into the courtroom ahead of a hearing or trial, getting them comfortable in the space, and prepping them candidly on what questions they may be asked. Still, Attwood acknowledges that awareness and preparation can only go so far. Because once a case goes to trial, a CSA victim isn’t just facing the judge, the opposing counsel, and their assailant; they’re also facing a jury, with all the various beliefs and baggage that those 12 people might bring into the jury box with them.

In Attwood’s view, the jury selection process for a CSA case “is as much about education and myth-busting as it is about selecting specific jurors to hear a case.” That’s because misconceptions about rape and sexual assault are hugely prevalent in the U.S. — for any victim, but especially in cases where the victims are minors. 

What do those misconceptions look like? Perhaps the most pervasive is the concept of “real rape,” a term coined in 1988 by lawyer Susan Estrich in her book, “Real Rape: How the legal system victimizes women who say no.” The assumption many people have is that “real rapes” 1) are only committed by strangers; 2) are only committed under duress, usually in situations where the rapist is wielding a weapon; and 3) are always extremely violent, leaving the victim with cuts, bruises, or other injuries. 

NO “REAL” RAPE
Statistically, the concept of “real rape” holds no grounding in reality. Per RAINN, more than 80 percent of all rapes are committed by someone the victim knows — be it a current or former romantic partner, a family member, or a friend/acquaintance. Those numbers balloon even further in CSA cases: 93 percent of juvenile rape victims know the perpetrator personally, with 34 percent of attacks being perpetrated by family members and another 59 percent by non-family acquaintances.

“When you hear the word rape, I think, typically, a shadowy figure in an alley and a forceful violent act is the first thing people think about,” Attwood says. “But especially with kids, [the assailant] is typically a person who is in a position of trust or authority. And they don't use force or violence to gain access to a victim; they use grooming behavior, and trust, and their status as a parental figure or authority figure. It’s a much different power dynamic than I think people would anticipate. So, a big part [of jury selection or trial proceedings] is talking about those things and getting people thinking about them, to get them off of their typical understanding of what rape or sexual abuse looks like.”

NO “RIGHT” BEHAVIOR
There are other major misconceptions about CSA, too. For one, Attwood says jurors will often go into a CSA trial with a specific expectation of how a victim will behave on the stand. That expectation of a “typical victim” — someone who is crying or otherwise emotionally distraught as they recount their experiences — also doesn’t always correspond with reality.

“We’ll have some victims that react in a way that might not be expected,” Attwood explains. “Some get really uncomfortable, and they will maybe laugh on the stand at times that you wouldn't expect, or otherwise react in a way that doesn't jive with [the jury members’] beliefs about how a victim should behave.” 

Those unexpected behaviors can be enough to convince a juror that a victim is lying — as in, “If they were telling the truth, they would seem more traumatized.”

“Really, it boils down to the notion that there's no reasonable way a victim should react to abuse,” Attwood says. “They react in a whole host of different ways, and that comes out in different behaviors that people might deem atypical.” 

RARE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
Another big stumbling block that prosecutors encounter with juries is the belief that physical evidence is an essential or even likely part of a CSA case. While Attwood acknowledges that such evidence would be helpful for building a case against a perpetrator, the vast majority of CSA cases are, by their very nature, more likely to hinge on two key pieces of testimony: that of the victim, and that of the person they are accusing. 

“We’re fighting against preconceived notions that people have from watching CSI and those types of shows: that there's always this forensic component to a case,” Attwood says. “And that's not the reality. [Physical evidence in a CSA case] is really rare, for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is that the perpetrator controls when something happens, how it happens, and whether or not physical evidence gets left.

“All of those factors are really in the perpetrator’s control. They choose a time and a place that helps them escape accountability for what they're doing. The second factor is that, in CSA, delayed reporting is the rule and not the exception. It’s rare that sexual abuse … gets reported immediately — if it gets reported at all. By the time a report comes in and an investigation is done, any physical evidence that may have existed would be long gone. So, what we have in front of us, in an overwhelming percentage of CSA cases, is the testimony of a victim.” 

Then there’s possibly the biggest barrier of all to getting a conviction in a sexual abuse case: The specter of false accusations. Especially when there’s no physical evidence to share, Attwood says it is exceedingly difficult to get juries to hand down a guilty verdict in a CSA case. That’s because, when it comes to sowing reasonable doubt, opposing counsel has a trump card, and playing that card is as simple as calling the victim a liar. 

 “There’s certainly a perception out there, and it gets argued a lot in trial, that false reporting is much more prevalent than it actually is,” Attwood says. “The idea that children may fabricate something like [a sexual abuse accusation]. But, statistically, the number of reports that are actually false is extremely low. I think it's somewhere around five percent, or lower than that. And so false reporting or fabrication is incredibly rare, and a lot of that gets vetted out in the pre-charge process. We look at every report that comes in, and a lot of those reports are actually declined because of things that we see that give us concern. So, for a case to get charged that involves a false report — if there are any — it's an incredibly small number.”   

“I usually try to make the point that this is not a fun process for victims to have to go through,” Attwood adds. “So, to assume that somebody would fabricate or falsify a statement, and then willingly subject themselves to a pretty horrific process, to me is a bit specious. It's not a not something you would choose to go through willingly, but for [this sexual abuse incident] actually happening, and for trying to hold somebody accountable for their behavior.”

PRE-TRIAL, PREVENTION
All these misconceptions around rape and sexual assault — not just CSA, but any type of sexual abuse — have their ramifications. Per RAINN, 13 percent of sexual assault victims who don’t report their cases never speak up specifically because they don’t think they will be believed.

For Attwood, the best way to break the “stacked deck” situation is through education. From “myth-busting” during jury selection to community engagement efforts aimed at “dispelling some of those notions about what [sexual abuse] actually looks like,” he says the Grand Traverse County prosecutor’s office is constantly trying to change the narrative around CSA — so that more victims can find justice, and more perpetrators are removed from situations where they could continue to do harm. 

Local prosecutors aren’t the only ones trying to address CSA by challenging misperceptions about it. In fact, that approach is at the heart of one of northern Michigan’s biggest potential game-changers for child advocacy: the Public Will Campaign (PWC), an effort aimed at “mobilizing entire communities to prevent CSA.” Described as “a primary prevention initiative powered by Michigan communities,” the PWC has a goal of making CSA “rare and non-recurring in our lifetime.”

The PWC was born out of the Traverse Bay Area Children’s Advocacy Center (TBCAC), one of several dozen CACs in the state of Michigan. Those centers exist first and foremost to provide support for victims of CSA and their families. Over the years, though, as TBCAC focused more and more CSA prevention, the organization started to differentiate itself from many other CACs in the state. That evolution eventually led to the formation of the PWC, a prevention-focused initiative that involves everyone from doctors to business owners to researchers. 

The PWC even caught the eye of Dr. Heather McCauley and Dr. Joanne Smith-Darden, a pair of researchers from the Michigan State University (MSU) School of Social Work who last fall landed a $1.6 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control to “strengthen the evidence base” for the type of CSA prevention that the PWC is trying to do. The four-year grant cycle will see McCauley and Darden working as key partners and researchers for the PWC initiative. Depending on their findings, the pair could help take the prevention concepts of the PWC beyond northern Michigan. 

YOU CAN HELP
Before the PWC, there was Team Zero, a TBCAC initiative that focused on “training 5 percent of the adult population in the Grand Traverse region in a CSA prevention program.” TBCAC ultimately deemed that training effort a success but also decided that it needed to think bigger to bring about more sustained structural change. That thought process led to the 2017 formation of the PWC, which focuses on the bigger picture of systems and social norms that allow CSA to occur in the first place.

According to McCauley, the launch of the PWC dovetailed with a desire at MSU to support CSA prevention research. Larry Nassar had just put MSU at the center of one of the highest-profile CSA scandals in American history, and the university was eager to start righting those wrongs. TBCAC and the PWC were ultimately selected “as the demonstration site to do this work,” and McCauley and Smith-Darden turned their eyes toward northern Michigan. 

“The first real important project that the PWC did was a survey of just under 800 participants in northern Michigan,” McCauley says. “They surveyed residents in the six counties served by TBCAC — Antrim, Benzie, Wexford, Kalkaska, Leelanau, and Grand Traverse — to understand how people thought about CSA in that region. There were several key findings. The first was that people were really proud to be from this community but didn't feel connected to their neighbors. The second piece was that people knew that CSA happened — many of them actually knew survivors — but they said, ‘It doesn't happen here.’ And then the third piece was that people said, ‘I want to know how to help prevent CSA, but I don't feel like I have the skills to do so.’ Those three points together really launched our work together.”

A ROADMAP FORWARD
McCauley and Darden-Smith’s work with the PWC is focused on three priorities: community building, community voice, and community mobilization. Along the way, they’ll collect research to show whether building more engaged communities can truly move the needle on CSA prevention.

“CSA is hard to talk about,” McCauley says. It’s a difficult subject for many people to grapple with. So, for the first part of our project, we need to build community. We need to build trust among community members so that they learn to have these conversations and feel safe having these conversations, and so they know someone has their back if they're going to engage in behaviors that are going to prevent CSA from happening. The second piece is exploring community voice, which means building relationships with communities in the six counties, getting to know them, and using qualitative methods — basically, different kinds of interviewing – to learn community perspectives on the issue. And then the last piece is working with communities to design community-specific campaigns that will mobilize communities to action.”

McCauley and Smith stress that their work is just one piece of the PWC, aimed at understanding and challenging the social norms that exist around CSA. But by getting into different communities and collecting data about how local residents think about this issue, the MSU researchers think they can help move the other “gears” of the PWC — namely, changing individual behaviors and driving shifts in public policy — and in turn identify strategies to help other communities keep kids safe. It’s an uphill climb, but one that McCauley is confident offers plenty of opportunity for progress and growth.

“We start from the assumption that everyone cares about this community,” she says. “We might have different perspectives, and there might be different things that we're worried about in the community, but we start from the place of recognizing that we all care. … These are hard conversations, and they've always been hard. No one's really cracked the code, yet, on how to do this. But I think if you start from a place of community, and from respecting that we all love this place, then you can start to create a platform for more meaningful conversations. Do I think we're going to prevent CSA in four years? No. But our goal is that, down the line, we're going to start to move the needle.”